Art glass panels have allured and captured the hearts and minds of artists, artisans, owners and viewers for centuries. The "art glass" terminology includes not only stained glass panels but also divided light panels of beveled and etched glass creations, as well as such panels which include objects having more three-dimensional properties, such as jewels or the like. Historically, art glass panels have typically been in the form of windows and have been the subject of tedious, time-intensive creations, generally relegated to unique single item designs for cathedrals, churches and religious structures, or for the very wealthy who could afford to commission such expensive artistic creations for their mansions or commercial enterprises. More recently, art glass panels have found acceptance as stand-alone interior panels, or as wall or ceiling lighted panel structures illuminated by background electrical lighting. While there have been attempts to produce art glass panels on a commercial basis for windows that could be used for residential purposes, such attempts have generally been thwarted by excessive costs and/or limited availability in sizes, designs and styles of such products. Accordingly, art glass panels have generally remained as high-priced, uniquely designed novelty or art items.
Historically, art glass panels have been configured in true divided light configuration wherein individual pieces of glass or objects forming the panel are held together by strips of caming which are soldered together to form an integral unitary panel structure. Such caming has a generally U-shaped cross-section that retainably holds the individual glass pieces or objects by their edges and was historically made of lead or leaded material for its ease of bending and shaping to accommodate curved or irregularly shaped pieces of glass or objects. Today's environmental proscription against the use of lead in consumer and building products has resulted in replacement or virtual replacement of the traditionally used lead caming with more environmentally acceptable and safe products such as zinc alloys. For a more complete understanding of the general construction of an art glass panel and use therein of modern alloy caming materials, the reader is referred to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/016,902 filed on Feb. 12, 1993, by Hanson et al., entitled Divided Light Inserts and Kit for Mounting, owned by the common assignee of this invention--the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference.
A number of factors have contributed to the excessive costs of art glass panels. Typically, an art glass artisan, having not only artistic ability but also skilled in the knowledge of material strengths, acceptable pattern configurations and structural considerations for creating art glass panels has been required to create an acceptable art glass design. Such gifted artisans that can accommodate the customer's unique needs are difficult to find and are generally quite expensive to retain. As stated above, historic art glass designs are constructed in true divided light configuration, requiring many, often thousands, of individual pieces of glass and objects to be cut in cooperative mating relationship to one another (e.g., in puzzle manner). The cost of the glass pieces and objects alone can be quite expensive, particularly when unique pieces of glass are purchased in small quantities or if particular pieces or objects require special grinding, beveling or shaping. The individual glass pieces and objects must be configured to match the artist's pattern. This requires the labor-intensive process of individually cutting or shaping each piece of glass or object so as to perfectly cooperatively mate with its adjacent pieces of the panel. Typically glass pieces have been cut by a scoring and breaking method, often resulting in high breakage and waste, particularly where the glass pieces include angles or curves. Further, pieces so created often have inherently irregular edge configurations that provide stress points for later breakage of the glass if mounted in a stressed manner. In order to reduce such stress conditions, the artisan will often grind individual glass pieces along their edges and will chamfer their corners by means of labor-intensive hand grinding processes. Forming the art glass panel also requires individual cutting and bending or forming of caming pieces to interconnect and mount each of the glass pieces or objects in precise cooperative mating relationship. Finally, the individual pieces of glass and objects must be assembled, one at a time, with intermediate caming, into a unified single panel, after which the individual caming pieces are soldered together at their junctions to form a unified completed panel. The entire process is very labor intensive, time consuming and expensive and has heretofore not particularly lended itself to commercial practicality.
In an effort to reduce the above labor-intensive processing costs associated with true divided light art glass construction, attempts have been made to produce look-alike products and to substitute other types of decorative glass products in place of a true divided light glass panel. Several such configurations have attempted to simulate the divided light look by gluing or otherwise bonding the individual glass and object pieces together along their edges and by overlaying a single piece of grid or grille structure shaped to look like caming, but made to overlie the bonded glass structure, on one side thereof. Others have used plastic films or the like to simulate the glass pieces, thereby eliminating cutting and bonding individual pieces together. While such attempts have reduced costs involved in constructing true divided light art glass panels, the products produced by such methods generally are not equal in appearance or performance to the traditional divided light glass products in which metal cames are used to divide the individual lights in each panel.
Even after an art glass panel has been designed, its availability for use as a commercially produced item has historically been severely limited, and not generally susceptible to economical mass production. As long as the size and shape of the design remains exactly the same, multiple copies of a particular art glass panel could be produced, gaining some advantage in amortizing the initial design costs over the multiple copies and possibly in the ability to purchase larger quantities of the different types of glass or objects used in the panel design. However, the remaining costly steps of cutting and preparing the individual pieces of glass and objects, and the labor-intensive assembly procedures remain. Further, if one wanted to change the size or shape of the panel, redesign would be required. Even a "proportional" change in overall size of the panel, while maintaining the general design configuration, would require each piece of the panel to be resized, in a costly time-consuming process.
Accordingly, while the need exists for commercially available art glass panels, there are generally no commercially available sources for a consumer that provide the flexibility of enabling a consumer to select a design, to have that design applied to the panel or window size and configuration that suits the customer's unique needs, and to have the panel economically manufactured in a relatively short time frame. Further, there are no known commercial sources available which enable a customer to select an art glass design, and to have that design reconfigured and displayed to him in real time in the manner in which it would appear when reconfigured to accommodate the customer's desired panel size and shape requirements, so that the customer can view the unique product he will be ordering. Further, the prior art is deficient in providing any degree of automation which will accommodate manufacture of an art glass panel that accommodates the customer's selected design and unique panel size and shape requirements.
The present invention provides a commercial, practical solution to the above shortcomings of art glass panels. The present invention, through computerized assistance, allows a customer to select an art glass design from a plurality of such designs and to have that design reconfigured while he waits, according to unique rule-based design parameters, to conform to the unique size and shape of the customer's desired art glass panel. Further, when applied to windows, the present invention enables the customer to provide the size and shape of the "rough opening" he wishes the art glass design to fill, to select from a plurality of window styles and shapes that will in combination properly fit such rough opening and to have the art glass design automatically reconfigured to accommodate such window combination selection. The present invention also provides for an automated art glass manufacturing process that takes the information generated by those computers that uniquely design the customer's art glass panel and uses such computer generated information to automatically cut the glass pieces which collectively comprise the larger composite art glass panel.